February 5, 2026

How to Teach Hotel Management

Team Parikrma has — more or less — successfully completed two days of our Hotel Management course for the Parikrma Empower Skills Academy. You might be wondering how the four of us ended up teaching a course on something we know virtually nothing about. By popular demand, the students chose the topic for us. While our first lesson left much to be desired, both by us and likely by the students, Tuesday was a much smoother run.

When we got to the Skills Academy, the students seemed excited to see us, ready for another day of our teaching. The four of us sat in the fishbowl board room before we began our lesson, realizing we had neglected to create a “Question of the Day.” After a little bit of back and forth, we settled on “Messi or Ronaldo,” a question all of us have been asked many times at Parikrma. We set up our slideshow and began our lesson with our question, receiving very few answers of either Messi or Ronaldo, instead hearing Neymar shouted out. After some coaxing, a few people picked Neymar “for his physique” and “because he is cute.” This was not really the discussion we were intending, but definitely started the day off on an entertaining foot.

Our lesson for the day was on housekeeping, maintenance staff, and security, full of lecturing and very few planned activities. I went through my slides on each job description quickly and we moved on to Sophia’s section on cleaning. After a video on competitive bedmaking that contained the unfortunate phrases “hucky tucky” and “who’s your daddy?”, we realized that our class was moving way too quickly and we were going to have to stall in order for it to last for two hours. Luckily, our two best talkers were up next, with Ali entertaining the students with jokes about wifi and questions about if she would get electrocuted by the wires hanging onto the sidewalk (according to one kid, yes, you will die if you touch the wires). Lila continued our talk by going through every type of hotel key in great depth as the rest of us plotted an activity to take up the rest of the time. From the first week, we learned that role play activities are great for keeping the students engaged — our brilliant idea was to make Lila be a suspicious customer and two of the students be the security team. Finally, the class was laughing and throwing out suggestions to make the security team more efficient. As our lesson drew to a close, we managed to fill the time with material that was both important and engaging to the class.

Being a teacher is hard work. From spending all our free time creating lesson plans to having some really rough class periods, this has been nothing short of challenging. I have been pushed out of my comfort zone every time I have to lead a small group or push through the students talking over me. At the same time, as we start to figure this thing out, it has been incredibly rewarding. After this Tuesday’s lesson, I am proud of our team for being able to adapt and think on the spot. We may not always be prepared for what this course will throw at us, but I am excited to see where each lesson leads.

By,
Isabel